When Lisa Kron was majoring in theater at Michigan's Kalamazoo College in the early 1980s and hoping for a career onstage, she received a memorable piece of advice. "I was told I should either lose 50 pounds or gain 100," she recalled recently. "And maybe, maybe if I could hold on until I was 40, I might get to play someone's mother."

Today, as the author of the acclaimed Broadway play "Well," a Tony-nominated best actress for her performance in that production, the creator of such vivid solo shows as "2.5 Minute Ride" and "101 Humiliating Stories" and a founding member of the incisive Five Lesbian Brothers theater troupe, Kron can smile, albeit a bit ruefully, about those discouraging words of 30 years ago. But as an artist whose work often brilliantly refracts the comically painful facts of her own life, she isn't likely to forget them anytime soon. And as she's quick to point out, noting that the overwhelming majority of American new play productions go to male writers, "the sexism in the theater is still stunning."

Kron's latest play, "In the Wake," is something of a departure. Spanning the George W. Bush administration and focusing on a group of New Yorkers in their mid-30s enmeshed in personal and ideological dilemmas, the play is neither overtly autobiographical nor conceived with a role for the playwright herself.

"In the Wake" opens on Thanksgiving night in 2000, with the outcome of the Bush-Gore election still unresolved. The protagonist, Ellen (Heidi Schreck), is a writer whose certainty about the depredations of a Bush administration ("There's a ruthless dismantling of the system happening here") plays off against a deep-seated ambivalence in her romantic life. A lesbian couple who live downstairs from Ellen and her partner in Greenwich Village are struggling to find their own balance in fractious times. Other characters include a grieving human rights worker and her teenage niece from rural Kentucky.

Kron rightly regards "Well," which deals with the nature of sickness and health, race, community, individual responsibility and parental legacy, as a play of ideas. They came to life in a confessional memoir focused on the playwright's mother and theatrically enlarged by Kron's Pirandellian imagination. "In the Wake," a five-act play made in what Kron allows to be a "more traditional" manner, deploys its combustive ideas directly in the dialogue. That quality, along with the play's attention to the volatility of the characters' passions, may spur comparisons to Tony Kushner's 1992 "Angels in America." Both works spin the topical clock back to recent Republican administrations (Reagan-Bush I for Kushner).

Seated in a green room at Berkeley Rep, with her white toy poodle, Django, hopping in and out of her lap, the ginger-haired Michigan native reflected on her choice to write what many will see as an overtly political play.

"We've been in profound flux," said Kron, who started "In the Wake" when Bush was still in office. "These have been scary times - and gold for playwrights. Like everyone else, I was ranting my way through the Bush administration, and also getting fixated on certain ideas about the left. I guess the central question, which is also present in 'Well,' is why we believe that things are always going to right themselves. Why do we believe we can only fall so far?"

Kron's ongoing preoccupation is empathy, whether it involves her father's family's Holocaust horrors ("2.5 Minute Ride"), her mother's confounding sense of justice ("Well") or the conflicted thirtysomethings registering the global anxieties of the past decade ("In the Wake"). "I've been able to do many things in my life because I'm middle class," she said, "and I don't imagine that I'm ultimately going to be homeless or starving. I believe there's only so far I can fall. So I began thinking about that and working with those ideas."

New style, new risks

For Kron, moving away from autobiographically based theater poses new risks. "I thought that if I tell you things that are true, then I know what I'm telling you," she said. "But if I make things up, then you're going to see my subconscious in a way that's very uncomfortable for me."

Kron, who idealized Carol Burnett when she was in high school and "made a study of how to be funny as a girl and not be obnoxious," began to find her artistic identity when she moved to New York and started working at that city's feminist Wow Cafe. That is where the Five Lesbian Brothers company was born.

Kron has never stopped being funny. But her work has grown more artful and probing over the years, leading to the resonant depths of "Well." Now, without venturing onstage herself for once, she's set out to explore the movements of her heart and mind as never before.